


Ordo ad Fratres Faciendum

by Sholio



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-18
Updated: 2011-02-18
Packaged: 2017-10-15 18:12:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/163512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A jumper crash separates the team on a wilderness planet, and they aren't alone. Late season five, somewhere before "Brainstorm"; mostly gen with background references to past Ronon/Keller, pre-Rodney/Keller, implied Teyla/Kanaan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ordo ad Fratres Faciendum

**Author's Note:**

> "Ordo ad Fratres Faciendum" translates (roughly) to "order of brother making"; it was a sort of blood brotherhood rite in the pre-modern Catholic Church.

"Well, guys," John said, spreading his arms with a flourish, "welcome to Operation Find That Energy Signature."

As introduced by his Vanna White impression, the scenery was gorgeous -- a long glacial lake, with snow-capped mountains reflected in its still waters. Pine trees, or the Pegasus equivalent, marched to its shores, and there were wildflowers everywhere: yellow and orange and a striking shade of purple, dotting the ground under the trees and growing waist-high along the lakeshore.

His team remained unimpressed.

"Don't you mean Operation: Bugs, Mud and Sleeping on the Ground?" This from Rodney, of course.

"In which piece of our luggage did you pack the towels?" Teyla asked. Torren had recently begun demonstrating an unfortunate tendency to get jumper-sick. He had demonstrated it repeatedly, in fact, on the flight down from the spacegate.

"I'm hungry," Ronon said.

"How can you possibly be hungry after the _Exorcist_ re-enactment," Rodney protested, pointing to Teyla, who had placed a fussy Torren on a patch of grass while she tried to clean up the baby and herself with a handful of Kleenex. Her patience wearing thin, Teyla frowned up at him.

"If you are not going to be otherwise helpful, Rodney, bring me a towel."

"Guys," John said. "Look around you. Fresh mountain air, lake full of fish -- perfectly edible, according to the biologists, as long as we avoid the red ones -- and an entire, virtually unexplored planet with odd energy signatures. What could be better?"

Rodney snorted from somewhere in the jumper's cargo hold. "The energy signatures are according to Xing's survey, and he's an idiot. I _also_ hear there are dinosaurs, which, okay, cool, but not up close."

"Small dinosaurs," John said, holding a hand about two feet off the ground. "Nothing on the entire planet bigger than a dog."

"According to the _biologists_." Rodney stuck his head and upper body out the back of the jumper, so that he could gesture to punctuate his words. "Why, pray tell, are _we_ doing this? You do know we have more than one team on Atlantis, right?"

"Because I'm your team leader and I said so."

"Rodney," Teyla said, efficiently stripping Torren while he squirmed, "if you do not bring me a towel soon, I will need _two_ towels."

"Towel. Right." He disappeared back into the jumper.

"You said there are fish?" Ronon asked.

"Sure, knock yourself out." John raised his voice. "Rodney, while you're in there, break out the fishing poles."

"Don't need a pole." Ronon stripped off his shirt as he strolled towards the water's edge.

"Some of those fish have teeth!" John called after him.

"So do I," Ronon called back.

"Remember not to eat the red ones!"

 

******

 

One of the perks of command was, every so often, picking out a cherry assignment. John didn't abuse it, but he made sure that all the other teams got a mix of pleasant assignments along with the weird, uncertain or dangerous ones, and it was only fair that his team get the same opportunities for downtime on relatively safe and relaxing worlds -- vacations, Pegasus style.

And this was almost, but not entirely, a vacation. Sure, there was a little work to be done, but John planned to do plenty of relaxing in the next two days, in between checking out the energy signature (and also checking in with Atlantis every twelve hours, because, hey, unexplored spacegate planet with weird energy readings; he wasn't _stupid_ ).

And also, he wanted to observe his team while they were relatively relaxed. Especially Rodney and Ronon.

For his first couple of years on Atlantis, John had never paid much attention to how his team related to each other off-duty. Or, for that matter, cared. His responsibility was making sure they worked together well in the field; if they liked each other or hated each other, it wasn't any of his business as long as they got the job done.

He wasn't sure when he'd started paying attention to it. Partly, it was just that the more experience he had as a manager and full-time commanding officer, the more he'd noticed that off-duty behavior tended to affect the way people behaved in the field. And more than that, when it came to his own team, it, well ... _mattered_.

And Ronon and Rodney weren't getting along. Worse than usual. John figured that if even _he_ was able to pick up on it, then things must be pretty bad. They'd never been the best of friends, but John was pretty sure that there was genuine affection underlying the sniping and glowering and general friendly(ish) antagonism. Or there used to be. Now he wasn't sure anymore -- he couldn't decide if the sharper edge that he'd noticed lately was an actual change, or if it was just that he was becoming attuned enough to pick up on more nuance.

A lot of things had changed in the last couple of years, between all the deaths and that thing with Teyla's people and that other thing with Teyla's baby and just all the ... stuff. There had been some fights. Some rifts. But in most cases, they'd struggled through all the messes and come out with a deeper understanding and trust in each other.

Not in this case, though. The frustrating thing was that he hadn't noticed anything going specifically _wrong_ \-- not like him and Teyla and the pregnancy thing, or him and Rodney and the Doranda thing. It made him question his confidence in his own insight, which was shaky enough to begin with. But it was his _team_ , damn it. He owed it to them to try to figure out what, if anything, was wrong, and fix it if he could.

After one particularly contentious mission he had cornered Ronon in the locker room. "Look," John said. "You know I hate talking about this, uh, stuff as much as you do."

Ronon raised an eyebrow. "What kind of stuff? You mean sex?"

John was pretty sure Ronon did this sort of thing on purpose just to mess with him. He could feel his ears turning red. "Can we stick to the point?"

"Be easier if you'd tell me what the point _was_."

John took a deep breath and started over. "I wanted to talk about you and Rodney."

"I'm not having sex with Rodney. And the way your military works, I'm pretty sure I couldn't tell you if I was. Are we done?"

_Aargh_. "Look, I can see there's some kind of, uh, thing," John said, and raised a hand quickly to forestall any more "helpful" comments. "Whoa, whoa, not that kind of a thing. I'm doing this badly. Give me a minute."

Ronon crossed his arms and waited.

Eventually John got his thoughts together. "Listen, seriously, I can see there's some kind of problem with you and Rodney. I don't really care what it is, but I need you to work it out on your own time, not team time. I can arrange meetings with Heightm -- with Krantz if you want." Damn it, even after a year and a half, he still kept doing that. It didn't help that the base went through counselors so fast that he'd heard rumors around the SGC that the position was cursed.

Ronon's face went blank -- well, blanker than usual. "There isn't any problem," he said. "And I don't need an appointment. Are we done?"

"Uh. I guess so."

As Ronon walked away, John wondered if that had been too easy. He tried feeling Rodney out on the subject later. "So. You and Ronon."

Rodney looked up from the video game console. "Wow, subtle."

"Are you guys, uh ..." John gestured with the game controller. He wasn't sure whether to finish with _okay_ or _fighting_ or _capable of working together_ or what, so he just let it trail off into silence, though when Rodney's eyes went wide John realized that he might ought to have been a little more specific.

"We're _not_ sleeping together, Sheppard."

"I didn't think you were!" Although it would, come to think of it, explain a few things.

"Not now and not ever," Rodney added, squinting at him. "Why? Are you wondering if he's avail--" Then his attention jerked back to the screen. "Hey! Not fair!"

John had shot his character while he was distracted. This seemed to effectively head off any further conversational awkwardness.

He wasn't sure if things actually got better, but both of them seemed to make more of an effort after that, mostly by not talking to each other. This did not strike John as a great improvement for purposes of team cohesion, but it wasn't like he could _prove_ that there was something wrong. He tried asking Teyla about it, one late night in the mess hall when she was up with Torren and he had some paperwork to finish. She was a lot better at these things than he was, after all.

"Do you notice anything, uh, weird about Ronon and Rodney lately?"

Teyla gave him one of those looks that was similar to Nancy's _You're being an idiot, John_ look, although much more affectionate. "Do you mean other than the situation with Dr. Keller?" she asked after a moment.

"What situation with Dr. Keller?"

"John," Teyla said after another pause, "if you have an issue with Ronon and Rodney, you should probably ask them, not me."

So much for Teyla being any help.

And so he put in a request for the M83-F98 survey. At the very least, it'd be a couple of days away from Atlantis. Whatever the heck might be going on with his team, a couple of days to kick back and relate to each other under relaxed circumstances couldn't hurt.

... or so he hoped, anyway. It'd be just like the Wraith or whatever Replicators were still running around out there to show up and throw a monkey wrench in the works, but the planet was an uninhabited spacegate world in an extremely backwater part of the galaxy; there was no _reason_ for anyone to come looking for trouble. Not that this had stopped anyone in the past, but he was pretty sure that he'd planned for all eventualities. They'd check in with Atlantis at regular intervals, and they had survival gear for two weeks in the jumper. He kinda wished he'd been able to talk Teyla into leaving Torren with Kanaan, but Teyla pointed out that she couldn't leave Torren overnight, since he was still nursing. "Although," she mused, "perhaps I could bring the breast pump that Dr. Keller gave me --"

"Torren it is, then," John said hastily.

And so, here they were, all five of them.

 

******

 

Rodney brought Teyla her towel and the duffle with Torren's clothes in it, then headed back into the jumper to get his equipment together, before she could suggest that he help with cleanup. Ronon appeared a moment later, grabbed one of the bags full of pointy things that he'd insisted on bringing, then vanished again without saying anything or looking in Rodney's direction.

Rodney stared after him for a moment. Something felt tight around his chest region. Mostly irritation, he decided. Maybe a little bit of hunger too. He munched on a granola bar while he hooked up his laptop to the Ancient data relay and ran the scanners through a quick calibration.

John appeared a moment later, reached for the bag with the tent, and blinked at him.

"What are you doing?"

"Working, hello?"

"Rodney, _vacation_ , hello?"

"Energy readings!" Rodney said, waving his arm at the mountains outside the jumper's windshield.

"At least stick around for lunch. Ronon's catching us a fish."

The uncomfortable feeling in Rodney's chest squeezed a little tighter. It did that around Ronon a lot lately. Maybe, if he probed deeper, there was a bit of guilt in it, and more than a little anger. "I'm eating right now," he said, and stuffed the rest of the granola bar into his mouth.

John hooked a hand in Rodney's vest and propelled him towards the jumper's hatch. Rodney reached to unhook his laptop but was dragged away from it.

"Rodney, those energy readings have been there for thousands of years; they're not going anywhere. Go chill with Teyla and at least _pretend_ to relax. That's an order."

"Yes, _sir_ , General Patton, sir," Rodney muttered, and sulked down the jumper's ramp.

However, Torren was clean and somewhat distracting, what with the squealing and wiggling and all. By the time that John and Ronon came back with a couple of long spiny fish -- more like eels, really -- Rodney and Teyla had a fire going, and Torren was babbling cheerfully in Teyla's lap.

"Now what, O Scout Leader?" Rodney demanded. Ronon glanced up from gutting the fish. It wasn't an especially friendly look.

"Now," John said, "we chill. Where's the cooler? There's beer in there. And Coke from the last Daedalus run."

"I'll get it," Ronon said, and jumped to his feet before Rodney could volunteer and, incidentally, grab his laptop.

Rodney eyed the fish nervously as John picked up the gutted carcasses. "Are you sure those aren't going to poison us?"

"Biologists said everything here is totally compatible with Earth life." John slung a grill on the fire and began to arrange the fish on it. "They even took some samples of the water from another of these lakes and cleared it for human consumption. Better than Evian. Hand me the pepper and the _tasit_."

"That's not saying much," Rodney said, passing over the bottle of Earth spice and the little cloth packet of spices from P34. "These are going to take forever to cook. How about I just take a quick jaunt over to the mountains and back. It won't take five minutes."

John rolled his eyes, but the corners of his lips quirked up. "What say, half an hour? Can you be back by then? And most importantly, will that shut you up?"

Rodney brightened. "Really? Sure, fine, whatever." He scrambled to his feet, brushing dirt and twigs off his pants.

"Hold on there; I need a couple favors if you're going up."

"Figures," Rodney said, tapping his foot. "Let me guess: check in with Atlantis?"

"Exactly." They needed altitude to dial the spacegate; the range on the jumper's DHD was not sufficient to do it from the planet. "Let them know we've set up camp, no problems, and we'll check in again tomorrow morning. If they don't hear from us --"

"Scramble a rescue, roger that, Captain Cautious. Anything else?"

"Before you check in, run a quick recon over the area. Scan for large life forms and do a visual surface check as well. _Then_ call Atlantis."

"Would you like a quart of milk while I'm out?" Rodney asked in a tone heavy with sarcasm. "How about a fully charged ZPM?" He turned towards the jumper and almost bumped into Ronon, coming back with the cooler. Probably getting in the way on purpose, but whatever; he could be the bigger man in this situation. "Out of the way, speed bump; I'm in a hurry." Well, maybe not.

"Whoa, wait, did I say you could leave yet?" John said. "This is an alien planet; no one goes anywhere alone. Ronon, go with Rodney, make sure he's back in thirty."

Ronon almost dropped the cooler, then set it down. "In the jumper?"

"Unless you'd rather walk."

Ronon shot him an annoyed look. For once, Rodney thought, the two of them were in agreement. "Wait, what? I don't need a babysitter!"

"Alien planet, Rodney. Don't make me quote procedure at you."

Rodney glared at him, but subsided, because he was right, damn it. "Just don't eat all the fish while we're gone."

At John's insistence, they went ahead and unloaded the rest of the gear first -- "This way Teyla and I can get the campsite set up," John remarked. At the moment he was holding a box full of DVDs. Rodney managed to suppress a snide comment about roughing it, because he was pretty sure he'd seen the new season of Doctor Who in there, and if John had managed to wrestle it away from the scientists, he wasn't going to complain.

"Can we _go_?" Ronon said.

John looked past Rodney at Ronon, like he wanted to say something, then said, "Remember, half an hour," and left.

Ronon had already settled into the shotgun seat. Rodney ran over a quick flight check and lifted off -- getting pretty good at it too, if he did say so himself, but Ronon said nothing, just gazed out at the distant mountains dropping away beneath them.

So that's how it was going to be, then.

 

******

 

The jumper's blocky shape circled the campsite. Teyla waved and held up Torren's pudgy arm to wave, too. "Puddlejumper," she said hopefully, but Torren just squealed and waved his arms and legs around, accidentally kicking her in the stomach.

"His first word's not going to be _puddlejumper_ ," John said, returning to the campsite and setting down the load of bundles in his arms. "That's quite a mouthful for a little guy like that."

"Mine was _tuttleroot_ ," Teyla said. "Or so Charin claimed."

The jumper executed another wide sweep around the campsite, like the world's least aerodynamic bird. Then the radio base receiver crackled. "The biggest wildlife headed your way is a flock of pigeon-like things," Rodney's voice said. "Also, Atlantis says hi. Does my half-hour start now, or did I just lose three and a half minutes doing _your_ job?"

Teyla smiled at John; he winked at her. "Not only that, but you lose five minutes for complaining," John said into the receiver.

Even small and tinny through the microphone, Rodney's annoyance was very loudly audible. "Sheppard!"

"Joking. Yeah, your half-hour starts now. We'll have the fish on the table when you get back."

The jumper flew over the campsite, waggled its drive pods like a pilot dipping his wings -- "Show-off," John muttered -- and then dwindled towards the mountains.

John poked the fire with a stick and checked the fish. "You said you saw some edible plants around? A salad would go real nice with these bad boys."

Teyla pulled out her baby sling from Torren's bag, a long swatch of decoratively woven red and gold fabric, and slung him at her hip. "Yes, there are marsh root and _pogos_ -hair at the edge of the water, and I saw some four-finger on my way back to the campsite."

John cracked open a beer and picked up a small plastic bucket. "Let's assume I understood anything you just said, and go get ourselves some salad."

John had, Teyla thought, chosen a pretty spot for their campout. The mountains came right down to the edge of the lake, several miles distant. The day was so clear and still that the reflection barely shimmered; it was like a second mountain range extended downward into the sky beneath their feet. The jumper, a tiny speck, flickered in and out of her view, circling like a distant bird of prey above the lower ridges of the nearest mountain.

 

******

 

The view from the jumper was pretty nice, Ronon had to admit. They were flying at about 2000 _stad_ according to the Ancestor numbers on the readout, which he translated in his head into Satedan and then Earth measurements -- about 1200 feet according to the measurements that John's people used. The mountains soared above and below them, filling the view screen. The height readout began to tick upward -- 3000 _stad_ , 4000, 5000 -- as Rodney took them up over the mountains' flanks.

Ronon found himself wishing, not for the first time, that he wasn't denied access to the jumpers by an accident of genetics. He didn't want it enough to let Atlantis's scientists mess around with his DNA, but it would be a neat thing to be able to touch the controls and have it respond to him. He'd ridden firecats once at a family friend's ranch, long ago, and he imagined it would be like that. He could still remember the way the sensitive animal had responded to his lightest touch, turning like an extension of himself.

Even without being able to feel it, though, he could tell the difference in the way Rodney flew. Under John's hands, the jumper was a delicate living instrument. Rodney flew it more like a machine: competent, but not graceful.

"You're staring at me," Rodney said, giving him a nervous look.

Actually, he'd been watching Rodney's hands on the dashboard. There wasn't really anything to say, so Ronon didn't answer, just returned his gaze to the view out the screen. Rodney had brought them around in a big circle. The lake where they'd camped was visible below them. At least, he thought it was the same lake; there were a number of long narrow lakes in the area, all running in the same direction. Glacial striations, Ronon thought. He'd studied geology at the academy, thought for a while he might go into that field, but then the war broke out.

"I got it for a minute, but lost it again. Xing thought it might have been the jumper's own instruments being mirrored by some kind of magnetic ore deposit." Rodney seemed to be talking to himself. As he talked, he brought the jumper down in a slow arc, the altitude numbers ticking downwards again. Descending with the mountains on three sides and the valley stretching below made Ronon even more acutely aware of the mountains' size.

"-- listening to me?" Rodney was looking at him again.

As if it made any difference. "Didn't realize you were talking to me."

"Do you see anyone _else_ in here?"

Ronon made a conscious effort to push his irritation away. It was never far from the surface when he was around Rodney -- the man just had a way about him that would try the patience of a priest -- but lately he'd had to struggle hard to keep it under control. It was just more comfortable not to be near Rodney at all, if he could help it.

"I'm listening," he said.

"No you're not."

Ronon stared at him in open disbelief. "What do you _want_ from me, McKay?"

"What are you going on about?" Rodney said, looking completely baffled. Then his gaze was drawn back to to the dashboard. "Aha!" he said. " _That_ was a power spike, and I don't think it's just mirroring, no matter what Xing says. Clearly the man doesn't know what he's talking about; he only has one PhD, after all, and I happen to know he did most of his grad work at --"

"Do you ever get tired of putting people down?" Ronon asked. It was an honest question, and one that had been simmering underneath the surface for a long time, but Rodney just gaped at him, his thought-car completely thrown off its tracks.

"What?"

Rodney was still staring at him when, a second later, the jumper lost power totally, and plummeted from the sky.

 

******

 

John and Teyla were both looking in its general direction when the jumper fell out of the sky like a rock.

Teyla's heart seemed to jump and lodge somewhere between her chest and her mouth. The jumper vanished behind the nearest ridge, its momentum carrying it forward at a steep angle. She strained her ears for a sound of impact and thought she caught something, like a door being kicked at a great distance, but she wasn't sure.

She turned to look at John. His face was chalk-white.

"Radio," John muttered, and tore back towards the campsite. It took Teyla a moment to get Torren situated in his sling. By the time she arrived on John's heels, he was speaking urgently into the base radio. "McKay, Ronon, come in. Come in, damn it." His voice cracked.

Torren, picking up on Teyla's mood, began to fuss. She soothed him automatically with one hand, petting his little body and tucking a finger into his mouth, while scrabbling with her other hand among their supplies for the backpack-style baby carrier that Jeannie had shipped to her from Earth.

John cursed softly under his breath as he shrugged into his tac vest. "The first aid kit, Teyla, where is it?"

"It was in the jumper, I believe." She lifted Torren out of the sling and put him in the backpack. John noticed what she was doing for the first time, breaking out of his shock-induced fugue.

"Where do you think you're going?"

"With you." She pulled the straps of the baby carrier over her arms and picked up Torren's quilted baby-bag. It would be difficult carrying it through the brush. She began to eliminate unnecessary items: the bottle (breast-feeding would be adequate), two-thirds of the spare diapers --

"No."

"Do not argue with me, John. I know you can move faster than I can with Torren on my back, so you go ahead; I will follow."

John let out his breath in a frustrated hiss. He hooked a canteen over his belt, swept his gaze around the campsite again, then picked up his P90. "The fire --"

"I will take care of it. Go!"

He nodded, and for an instant his eyes were soft, pleading. Then he took off running.

Teyla yanked the grill off the fire and then upended the cooler over it, inundating the coals with ice and bottles of imported Earth beer and other drinks. This was an emergency; no time to fetch water from the lake. She wrapped up the fish in a napkin and stuffed a handful of Earth energy bars into the baby bag beside it. It was only a few miles to the end of the lake, but there was no telling when they would get back to the campsite. She could fill her canteen in the lake.

Her eyes were drawn to the ridge where the jumper had gone down. Atlantis would not send help until morning. And they could not contact them sooner if the jumper was not working.

_One thing at a time,_ Charin would say.

Teyla gave the campsite a last cursory look, as John had done, and then followed his trail, running lightly through the long weeds at the lake's edge.

 

******

 

The jumper hit water. From this height it was like smacking concrete. The impact cracked the ten-thousand-year-old shell of the vessel like an egg, tearing it nearly in half. They flipped, rolled and went under.

Rodney never quite lost consciousness, but his face slammed into the console and the world exploded in a shower of stars. Cold water slapped his face and body, shocking him out of a drifting haze. Water was flooding in through the jumper's shredded body, and he pushed instinctively away from the steering console, struggling free and striking towards the beckoning gap and the light streaming through it. He had a vague memory of hearing somewhere that foundering ships created suction around them -- _Didn't Mythbusters try that once?_ said the part of his brain that never shut up -- and he kicked away from it. His body wasn't responding properly, but with adrenaline still racing through him, along with a startling sense of elation that he'd survived the crash, he felt no pain and had no idea where, if anywhere, he'd been injured.

It wasn't until he was clear of the jumper, seconds later, that he remembered he hadn't been alone. He turned around in the water, holding his breath. The jumper was rolling slowly away from him, shedding a trail of debris as it sank -- pieces of the hull, aluminum cases holding tools and other gear. It took him a moment to spot Ronon, because Ronon was still in the jumper. The passenger side appeared to have buckled on impact, trapping him. Rodney couldn't tell in the dim light if Ronon was conscious or not. He glimpsed movement, but couldn't tell if Ronon was trying to free himself or if it was nothing but his limbs drifting limply, floating like seaweed as the jumper rotated with ponderous grace, dragging itself down.

_Oh God._

He needed to breathe. He kicked for the surface, aware once again that some part of his body -- _my arm, my shoulder, something like that_ \-- wasn't quite working right. His head broke out of the water and he gasped, once, twice, three times. He wasn't a terribly strong swimmer, but he was competent at it. In fact, he'd won a medal once, in Mrs. Bradshaw's Grade 3 swimming class. It was made out of paper. Jeannie had eaten it a few months later...

_Concentrate._

Ronon could probably free himself. If Rodney went down there, he'd do nothing but get in the way and risk being trapped and drowned. But even as he thought it, he gulped air and kicked down. Just like in the swimming pool. Although it was cold, oh God, it was cold.

He caught the edge of the rift in the jumper's side, pulling himself into the dead hulk. Ronon's eyes were open, staring through the water at him .... _through_ him. For an instant Rodney almost lost his lungful of air as the sheer horror of it paralyzed his lungs. Then he hauled himself forward, hand-over-hand, and wrapped his arms around Ronon. There was brief resistance and then they were both free. Ronon's long hair drifted around them in a sinuous cloud. For a terrible instant Rodney couldn't tell which way was up, and then he realized that all he had to do was let his body's natural buoyancy take over. He could never get to the bottom of the pool. _Fat kids float,_ Mrs. Bradshaw used to say. Come to think of it, he'd never liked Mrs. Bradshaw, swimming medal or not.

An eight-year-old's long-buried anger and resentment gave him the extra strength to kick hard, fighting the water's pull even as the ache in his lungs grew into a desperate _need_. His face broke the surface and he gasped, then caught a mouthful of water when he stopped kicking -- with his arms full of Ronon, he couldn't stay afloat, and the water closed over his face. _Ohgodohgodohgod._ An atavistic fear of drowning seized him, and he almost let go of Ronon, but instead he lashed out violently with both legs. His head and shoulders broke the surface just before giving in to the temptation to suck in a lungful of water. He gasped wildly, even as he felt himself going under again.

_Think, stupid._ He'd learned basic lifesaving too, along with a class of other Canadian schoolchildren, a lifetime ago on another world. Rodney freed an arm from Ronon's deadweight -- trying not to think about just how _dead_ that deadweight felt; Ronon wasn't moving at all -- and let himself drift until he got a feel for treading water without going under. His right shoulder still felt like it was messed up somehow, but he could hold Ronon against his chest with that arm, as long as he didn't think about the mechanics of it too much.

_I gotta get him to shore. Fast. I can't do this for long._

Luckily he was close. In fact, a little bit of a change in their trajectory and the jumper would've slammed into a granite ridge; there wouldn't have been anything left of him to ship back to Jeannie. Rodney kicked backwards and almost immediately felt something brush his foot. He kicked at it, got his feet tangled in water weeds -- for a minute he thought something had grabbed his ankle, but then his feet sank ankle-deep into mud, and he dragged Ronon out onto the weed-choked verge of the lake, under the shadow of the ridge that had nearly killed them.

With Ronon's feet still trailing into the water, Rodney rolled him onto his back and tilted his head back. His eyes were still open, staring at nothing. Rodney jammed his fingers under Ronon's jaw, groped for a pulse, then laid his hand flat on Ronon's chest. He thought he felt a flutter, but maybe it was his own shivering.

He tried a couple of rescue breaths anyway, trying to pretend it was the rescue dummy back on Atlantis. Then Ronon bucked and choked and Rodney rolled him over onto his side -- _thankGodthankGod_ \-- as he vomited up half the lake and then curled onto himself, shivering.

Rodney sprawled on his back in the mud, one hand on Ronon's shoulder, and stared up at the blue sky. He couldn't stay that way for long, though, because he was shaking with cold and also, quite a few parts of him were starting to hurt, including his shoulder and his face.

_Okay, think, genius._ John and Teyla were not too far away, if the jumper had gone down where he thought it had. They weren't on the same lake, but the lake where they'd camped was only one or two ridges over. Maybe fifteen kilometers, tops. Probably less. Rodney reached for his radio, but his arm just flopped like a dead fish -- _ow_. He tried it with the other arm, and found, unsurprisingly, that he didn't have a radio. It'd been knocked from his head when his face hit the console.

Rodney reached over and touched the side of Ronon's head. Ronon slapped weakly at his hand. "Stop it," Rodney said. "Radio." But he could already tell that it wasn't there; both their radios were at the bottom of the lake along with the jumper and all their survival gear.

For now at least, they were on their own.

Once his head stopped spinning, Rodney sat up. The lake where they'd fallen was in another of those narrow, steep-sided glacial valleys. This one made the one where they'd camped look gentle and wide by comparison. He couldn't imagine they had any chance of climbing the granite ridge towering above them, not in their present condition, which basically left picking a direction and walking. Serried ranks of pine trees clustered at the water's edge in both directions, making it hard to tell if the going got rougher.

On their side of the valley, they were in shadow, and it was cold down here by the water. Rodney's teeth were chattering and he couldn't stop shivering, but more worrisome was the fact that Ronon _didn't_ seem to be shivering, and he'd been submerged even more thoroughly.

_And it'll be colder come nightfall. Why did I let Sheppard talk me into this again_? But he knew it wasn't the Colonel's fault. The familiar cadence of complaint helped distract him a bit, though, as he patted himself down, trying to tell the difference between general pain and actual injury. Everything hurt, but his fingers came away wet with blood when he touched his face, and his nose was a raw, throbbing wellspring of pain. _I hope I'm not too hideous. It's hard enough to get the minions to mind me as it is. Does Atlantis have any plastic surgeons?_

He knew he'd moved his right arm quite a bit when he was in the water, between the adrenaline and the sheer desperation, but it had stiffened up into a plank of wood. He couldn't do more than let it dangle at his side and try not to bump it. His shoulder felt hot and puffy, stretching the material of his uniform jacket tight. One of his knees was also swollen, but when he tried it, he could put weight on it.

"Ronon," he said, bending over with a wince -- it felt like he'd wrenched his back too -- and gripping Ronon's shoulder with his good hand.

He had to shake hard to get Ronon to respond. At first the only reaction he got was a couple of wet, awful-sounding coughs. Finally Ronon mumbled with groggy irritation, "What?"

"Oh, thank God. I don't want to be stuck out here all alone. Get up."

"What ..." Ronon rolled over onto his back and blinked up at the sky. Rodney had a quick, awful flash of the way he'd looked underwater, his eyes open, _dead_. "The jumper fell," Ronon said.

"Thank you for that cogent recap of recent events. Now, I'd rather not die of hypothermia, so can we at least get somewhere warm?"

"What happened?"

The temptation to say _The jumper fell_ was almost overwhelming, but Rodney managed to squash it -- _And they say I have no filter between brain and mouth; ha._ "We lost power, including propulsion. I have no idea why. Everything was working fine, and then suddenly it wasn't."

He was braced to defend his handling of the situation -- there really _hadn't_ been anything he could have done, after all. Even John probably couldn't have guided it down without disaster; the jumper without propulsion was as aerodynamic as a brick. But Ronon just shook his head and said thickly, "Help me up."

"You don't look like you should be getting up."

Ronon just scowled at him, started to lever himself up off the ground, and fell back with a gasp.

"See? See? You're probably horribly broken or something -- you were stuck in the jumper and _not breathing_ , Ronon."

He hadn't realized it had freaked him out as badly as it had, but he couldn't stop seeing it, every time he blinked -- Ronon's eyes, open and staring. Ronon wasn't trying to get up again, which seemed like a bad sign. Rodney started to kneel, then his bad knee reminded him with a stab of pain why that wasn't a good idea, so he sat instead, thrusting the leg out awkwardly. He was sitting in the mud -- cold mud, too -- but it wasn't really possible to get any wetter.

He started patting over Ronon's torso, not really sure what he was looking for --anything obviously wrong, he guessed. Ronon swatted halfheartedly at him once and then let him do it. Pretty much he just felt like ... Ronon, but when Rodney prodded at his side, Ronon sucked in his breath and then swung a fist. His aim was off -- also a bad sign -- and Rodney hastily ducked as the fist swung through the air where his head had been a second before.

"Nice," Rodney said. "Hit the person who's trying to help you."

"Reflex," Ronon muttered through clenched teeth, his voice strained.

Rodney moved to poke again, to try to determine what was wrong, but Ronon made another fist, so he hastily desisted. It had felt -- _mushy_ , yielding. "I think you have some broken ribs," he said.

"Knew that already." Ronon coughed, a wet hacking sound.

"And you couldn't have said? Do you know you're really bad at communicating?" Then Rodney noticed for the first time that it wasn't just water turning Ronon's pants leg so dark. "Oh my God, you're bleeding."

"I know," Ronon said tightly. "Think my ankle's broken too."

Rodney reached for Ronon's boot.

"Touch it," Ronon said, "and die."

Rodney snatched his hands back. "I'm trying to help. But, fine, you can bleed to death if you really want to."

"Right now I'm pretty sure the boot's all that's holding my foot in place. Possibly all that's holding it on."

Rodney could actually _feel_ the blood drain out of his face. "Okay, that's my horrible mental image for the day."

"Be glad it's not _your_ foot."

"This conversation is officially over," Rodney said, and then Ronon clutched his arm and yanked him down into the mud and weeds. "Hey!" he started, but Ronon clamped a wet, muddy hand over his mouth.

"Shhh!" Ronon hissed, and let him go.

Rodney stayed there, sitting in the mud, mostly because he was afraid of what would happen if he tried to move. "What?" he whispered back. "Predator? Hallucination? _What_?"

Ronon jerked his chin towards the sky. Rodney looked up, and went stiff in alarm.

 

******

 

John ran for nearly a mile, flat-out, charging through brush that ripped at his face and uniform, before sanity caught up with him and he slowed to a more cautious trot. After another mile or so, he stopped to take a compass reading and a fresh bearing on the ridge that had swallowed the jumper. He also tried the radio again. "Ronon. Rodney. Come in. Damn it, guys, if you can hear me, give me a sign. Something."

He waited. Even a break in the static would have been welcome. But there was nothing.

_They're dead, John. You know it._

He drew deep, gulping breaths, like he'd run a marathon rather than just a couple of miles that were well within his tolerance. The mountain air had seemed so fresh before, but now it shredded his throat as if each breath was full of knives.

His mission was the same, though, whether they were dead or not. Find the crash site, recover what could be recovered, and wait for Atlantis. _We don't leave people behind. No matter what._

Teyla caught up to him, jogging slowly with a wide-eyed Torren looking around from the backpack-style carrier. _Go back,_ John wanted to tell her. All the crash sites he'd ever seen blurred together in his head into a haze of twisted metal and smoke and reeking jet fuel. He didn't want them to pass under that round-eyed baby stare.

But Torren was too young to remember, and John knew that Teyla had as much right to be there as he did.

She wordlessly handed him her canteen, fresh and dripping with cold lake water. He drank, letting it bite at his throat. When he started to hand it back to her, Teyla frowned and looked past him.

"What?" John said, and turned, looking over his shoulder.

A dark speck was moving in the sky above the mountains. For one heartbreaking instant he thought it was the jumper, that it had all been a mistake. John fumbled in his tac vest for his little binoculars and put them to his eyes. The moving speck jumped into relief, and he cursed under his breath. He'd seen ships like that before -- this one was much smaller, but the design was unmistakable.

"What is it?" Teyla asked tensely.

"It's our old friends the Asgard, Pegasus edition."

The ship was moving in an obvious search grid. For one crazy instant John thought about asking for help. Technology like the Asgard's might be the only way to find the jumper in time and save anyone who might have survived the crash. Then he thought of the explosive device in the suit left behind on Atlantis, and the things Rodney and Jackson had said about their captivity. No, these guys weren't going to help out of the goodness of their little shriveled hearts.

John lowered the binoculars and looked around for a hiding place. The pine-covered hill behind him rose into a sharp ridge, offering a difficult retreat but a reasonable amount of cover.

"The trees should conceal us from the air," Teyla said, obviously having the same thought. She gripped his wrist and started to drag him back into the denser forest, but John resisted.

"It won't help if they're scanning for life signs. Nothing on this world bigger than a dog, remember? They see something our size, they'll know immediately that we don't belong here."

"Do you know a way to fool their scanners?" Teyla asked. Her legs were slightly bent, knees flexed, poised to run -- as if it would help with a spaceship, but John felt the same.

"No --" he began, and then his eyes dropped to the lake water. The very _cold_ lake water ... "Wait. If their scanners work like ours, then they're mostly scanning for heat."

Teyla followed his gaze. "I cannot take Torren into the water, John. I will return to the campsite --"

"No!" Now it was his turn to seize her wrist. There was so little time. "I have an idea."

He told her, and her eyes went wide.

"John. No. I cannot."

"No choice." He flicked a glance up at the ship. Its grid was bringing it closer; it might already have spotted them. "It's our best way to avoid detection. Our _only_ way."

Teyla swallowed, then removed the baby pack and began sliding out of her clothes.

 

******

 

Ronon thought he recognized the design of the ship, but Rodney confirmed it a moment later anyway. "Asgard," he whispered, his lips near Ronon's ear. "Like the ones that took me." And Dr. Jackson, Ronon thought, but didn't say it. "What are they doing _here_?" Rodney added in an even more penetrating whisper, and Ronon wished he'd shut up.

The ship was briefly visible, then turned and vanished from their field of view. "Maybe it didn't see us," Rodney said, but then it reappeared, much lower, coming up their valley from the downslope end. "Crap, crap! We gotta hide!"

He started scrabbling backwards, deeper into the weeds and brush. Ronon grabbed his wrist, arresting his backward progress, and otherwise didn't move. They were plainly visible and had almost certainly been seen already; thrashing around wasn't going to do anything but draw attention to them.

"Got weapons?" Ronon whispered out of the corner of his mouth.

"Right, because I had time to stop and grab a full arsenal from the _sinking jumper_."

The ship did a single pass over them at about the height of the ridgetop, then made a tight circle and came back to hover in the middle of the lake, directly across from them. Ronon eased his blaster out of its waterlogged holster. Twin doors swung open in the belly of the ship, and a blue beam played back and forth across the water.

"Would now be a good time to run?" Rodney whispered.

"No."

Grapples shot from the hold of the ship, struck the water with little puffs of spray, and vanished beneath the surface. A moment later, the water roiled and churned, and the dripping hulk of the jumper broke the surface.

"Now?" Rodney whispered.

Ronon felt a muscle twitch in his jaw. "You think you can outrun a spaceship?"

"Well, no, but --"

"McKay, running isn't gonna help. Trust me. Best thing we can do is stay still, be quiet and get ready to fight."

Rodney shifted in the mud. "I'm, uh, not good at that. Any of it, really."

"Yeah, I've noticed."

Seeing the ruined mess of the jumper made him even more surprised that they'd survived. Trailing water and dripping weeds, it rose smoothly into the ship's hold. The doors stayed open, however, as the ship rotated slowly in place and glided towards them.

"Okay, I _really_ think running would be good now," Rodney whispered.

Something darted from the ship's belly, a bright object so fast-moving that the eye could not track it. Ronon started to spin that direction, but the tug across his smashed ribs made his vision swirl red and then he was looking down his blaster at one of the big Asgard battle suits that John had talked about, standing not ten paces away from them. It was holding a sleek little gun, pointed at the two humans.

"You're coming with us," the Asgard said.

"Yeah, no," Ronon said, and fired. He hadn't gotten a chance to try his blaster on those suits yet.

A glimmering blue shield sprang up instantly. His shot splashed across it with no more effect than a water balloon. Right, John had mentioned those too.

The Asgard did not speak again; it just fired its little weapon, strobing quickly from Rodney to Ronon. The beams were bright yellow-green. Seeing Rodney's muscles seize up before he pitched over, Ronon had just enough time to think, _This is gonna hurt._

He was right.

 

******

 

Shivering and gasping, John and Teyla pulled themselves out of the water. They'd been shallowly submerged at the weed-clogged edge, breathing through hollow reeds Teyla had found for them. Teyla's teeth were chattering so hard that she could barely say, "We could not have stayed under much longer."

They padded swiftly, barefoot, to the trees where they'd stashed their clothes -- and Torren, dangling from a tree at head-height in the backpack held up by Teyla's belt. The baby was awake, but not alarmed; he squealed happily when he saw Teyla, and she kissed his round baby cheek, not wanting to touch him yet with her cold hands.

They had nothing to dry themselves with except for handfuls of leaves. As they dressed, they stamped in circles, trying to restore some warmth to their chilled bodies.

In their brief, furtive moments of surfacing, they'd watched the Asgard ship raise the dripping, shattered wreckage of the jumper -- Teyla did not want to speak of it to John, but she was not sure anyone could have survived that -- and then vanish briefly below the ridgeline before doing another pass over the area. The ship had hovered for a moment over their campsite, then left. Probably they thought the intruders had all been in the jumper.

"If there were any survivors, they'll be wherever that ship went," John said, chafing his arms with his blue-tinged hands.

Teyla did not mention how slim the chance of survivors was. He already knew.

"You should go back to the campsite and wait for Atlantis --"

"And do what?" Teyla demanded, shrugging into the baby carrier. "Hide in the water again, if they send out more scout ships? If I go with you, then I may be able to help you, and we can both protect Torren." She gripped his arm. "I do not want to split up, John."

He took a breath, didn't look at her, but nodded.

They set out again at a smooth, distance-eating trot. The exercise brought the feeling back to her numb limbs, and slowly the shivering stopped. Still, it was midafternoon now, the sun sinking steadily towards the edge of the ridge behind them. Teyla had found the day pleasantly warm, but now all she could think about was how cold the night was going to be. Hunger gnawed at her belly. She dug out some of the cooked fish, and they shared the meal as they alternated between walking and jogging. As hungry as she was, the food tasted like ashes; all she could think of was how they'd intended to share it between the four of them, back at the campsite.

Eventually they reached the end of the lake -- or, rather, the point where it did a dogleg bend and then continued towards the highlands. Teyla had seen from the jumper that the lake terminated as the ground rose into the mountains, but it would take them precious hours to circle around and get into the next valley from the upper end. The lake was not terribly wide, but Teyla remembered all too well how cold the water was. In warm water, it would be a comfortable swim, but in the icy mountain water, they'd be risking hypothermia or worse.

"Ideas?" John said, staring across the lake at the opposite side of the valley. "There was an emergency raft in the jumper, but that's not much help ..."

At least the problem gave her something to focus on, something immediate, not the worry and stress of the past hour. "We need to find something that floats."

There were a number of drowned, dead evergreens along the lake's margin. Some had fallen and already become waterlogged; others leaned precariously, bare branches jutting out like fingerbones. John and Teyla pushed at the dry trunks until they managed to topple one into the water. It floated reasonably well, though it was not large enough to support their full weight without going under. So they stripped again -- Teyla sighed at the loss of hard-won body heat -- and piled their gear with Torren, still in his carrier, between two branches on the spiny trunk.

They paddled over, torsos pulled partway out onto the log to try to conserve as much heat as possible. Still, they were both shaking and blue by the time they reached the opposite side.

"T-Torren is hungry," Teyla said, crooning to the fussing baby as she settled him in his carrier again.

John shook his head, trying to still his chattering teeth. "We need to move first. G-get warm. Rest on the other side of the ridge."

The climb warmed them and, at least for awhile, entertained Torren, but by the time they broke out onto the open, windswept ridgetop, she'd already had to head off one round of wailing and Torren was threatening to burst into another. They stopped to rest at the edge of the trees, and Teyla tucked Torren into her jacket, settling him on her aching breast, while John dug granola bars out of the baby bag.

"Do we have a plan?" Teyla asked between bites. Torren had settled into limp somnolence against the bare skin of her chest.

"Find where the ship went, and get there." John pointed up the mountainside with half his granola bar, the way the ship had gone.

Teyla looked up at the mountainside: huge boulders and scree slopes interspersed with bands of evergreens. It was going to be a demanding hike. Again, the voice of caution and reason urged her to speak: most likely the Asgard ship had gone too far for them to follow, and they would be exposed as they moved across the mountainside.

But the alternative was to go back to the campsite and simply wait.

"Should we examine the crash site first?" she asked.

John opened his mouth, then frowned and took the life signs detector out of his jacket. "I wonder what the range on this thing is. McKay can widen it out to almost a mile; it's not good for much fine resolution at that distance, but on this world, we ought to be able to find anything our size ..."

He fiddled with it for a while, obviously emulating what he'd seen Rodney do. His face was set, expressionless. Teyla could see the scale change, but the only large life-sign readings were theirs.

"They could be in the water," she offered. "As with us."

John shook his head and tucked the LSD back into his jacket, face still carefully without expression. "It's been almost two hours since the crash. If they're in the water, they're dead."

They gathered up their trash, had a drink from the canteens, and moved on.

 

******

 

Rodney woke with a groan. He was lying sprawled on a cold stone surface, and, if possible, everything hurt even more than it had before. He felt like all his wrenched muscles had been wrenched in new, even worse directions.

He raised his head. The whole room was made of stone, about fifteen meters across, with no visible features aside from a door set into the wall, slightly taller than human-size -- Rodney assumed it had been built to accommodate the Asgard battle suits, which wasn't a terribly comforting thought. A pair of glowing strips in the ceiling provided harsh blue-white light.

Ronon lay in a heap beside him. Rodney checked to make sure that he was breathing -- he was -- before limping around the room. Nothing -- no windows, no electrical outlets, not even a toilet, which he imagined was going to become a problem eventually.

He patted himself down. They'd left him everything in his vest pockets, not that there was much that was useful in a situation like this: sodden Kleenex, equally sodden field notebook, Tylenol -- he took a couple of those, and saved out another packet for Ronon.

Ronon's blaster wasn't in his holster. Rodney wondered if they'd checked him for knives. He was poking through Ronon's hair when Ronon woke up and almost punched him again.

"Hey!" Rodney said.

"What are you doing?" Ronon demanded, scowling at him. His voice was rough and weak.

"Looking for knives."

Ronon slumped back down on the floor. "Don't."

Rodney sighed and circumnavigated the room again. He didn't even have a life signs detector. Presumably the Asgard had the one from the jumper now, damn their grabby little gray fingers, and the only other one they'd brought to this world was with John.

John and Teyla had better be coming for them. And they'd better be all right.

 

******

 

Ronon felt like warmed-over _dunka_ shit. He'd been hurt worse than this before, but rib and chest injuries were among the worst kind to have -- they really interfered with motion. And he didn't like the squishy feeling in his boot. His whole foot and ankle were a great throbbing ball of pain. He'd been kinda exaggerating to Rodney about his foot being severed, but he couldn't feel his toes, and he hoped there wasn't nerve damage.

"I wonder what they want with us," Rodney said, pacing along the wall again and trailing his fingers over its surface.

Ronon wondered that, too, but he didn't like any of the answers that he came up with.

Rodney eventually got tired of staring at featureless walls, and came back to sit down beside Ronon. Rodney looked awful, although Ronon was pretty sure the damage was only superficial -- the right side of his face was one giant bruise, and his nose was starting to swell. The submersion had washed off most of what otherwise, Ronon suspected, would have been a lot of blood. He wasn't entirely sure if Rodney had noticed what had happened to his face, and hadn't pointed it out because he didn't want to provoke a flood of complaints.

"Tylenol," Rodney said, dangling a red and white packet in front of Ronon's nose.

He dry-swallowed them, murmured "Thanks" after a moment. He doubted if they'd take the edge off what he was feeling, but maybe it would help a little.

"Can you sit up?" Rodney asked after a moment.

"Why?"

Rodney slipped back into his usual abrasive shell. "Oh, I don't know -- because maybe that's a good thing to know about a person when you're stuck in a prison cell with them? And maybe you'll lose less heat to the floor if your whole body isn't in contact with it? I don't want to explain to Sheppard that I let you freeze to death."

"No."

Rodney blinked. "No?"

"No, I don't want to sit up."

"I didn't ask if you _wanted_ to --"

"If I have to," Ronon said, "I can," and he shut his eyes.

"You could have _said_ ," Rodney groused after a pause.

After a little while, Ronon heard him get up and start moving around again. He tried to tune Rodney out, but there was nothing else to concentrate on except how miserable he was. On top of all his other woes, his chest felt wet and heavy, and a tickle was building in the back of his throat; he tried to resist it, because he had a feeling that coughing was really going to hurt. _Pneumonia? Great. Just what I need._

He tried to make himself believe that he'd be back on Atlantis soon, recuperating in a nice warm sterile room, but it was hard to convince himself, not when the instincts of seven years on the run said otherwise. They needed an escape plan, but it was hard to come up with one when he didn't know what the Asgard were capable of. They weren't human, weren't Wraith -- he wasn't sure how to fight them.

And Rodney's pacing was driving him _crazy_.

Rodney's footsteps approached him on one circuit. Ronon didn't open his eyes, until something damp and heavy and kind of warm settled on top of him. This jarred his ribs and provoked the coughing fit that he'd been trying to restrain. It hurt about as much as he'd been afraid it would.

The heavy thing turned out to be Rodney's uniform jacket, leaving Rodney in his tac vest and short sleeves. It was still warm from Rodney's body heat.

"Uh," Ronon said, and stalled out.

Rodney looked embarrassed. "You need it more than me. All you've got is that shirt, and it's all torn up. Why didn't you wear your coat?"

"Didn't need it." But, he thought, Rodney had a point, even if he might not know it. Living with these people had made him soft; he'd gone out in the wilderness without even putting on his coat, leaving most of his survival gear behind.

_Stupid mistake. Hope you survive it._

And making it worse, he wasn't just responsible for himself anymore. He opened his eyes and discovered Rodney sitting next to him again. With the jacket off, the swelling and bruising on his right shoulder were more evident, purple streaks and blotches extending almost all the way to his elbow.

"Can you move that arm?" Ronon asked.

"Oh, _now_ you talk to me." But it was more reflexive than genuine irritation. Rodney started to lift his arm and then let it fall back down, biting his lip. "If I have to, I guess. I don't think it's dislocated or anything. I can move the fingers if I have to type." He wiggled them to demonstrate, though from the look on his face, it still hurt. "Not that I have anything to type on."

"Aren't we a great pair," Ronon said.

Rodney's mouth quirked.

Ronon thought there was probably more that should be said. "Thanks for the jacket," he added after a moment.

Rodney shrugged with his good shoulder, and the corner of his mouth twitched. "Didn't need it."

And that wasn't quite _all_ that needed to be said. Ronon mused on how exactly to ask what he wanted to ask. He wasn't exactly angry anymore, not really, but ... "Rodney --" he began, and then the door opened and two of the guys in mech-suits came in.

Rodney scrambled stiffly to his feet, and Ronon pushed himself up with the arm on his good side.

"We need to ask you some questions," the suit on the left said, its voice buzzing with the suit's mechanical distortion. "I suggest you answer honestly and immediately."

The suit on the right said, "Are you human?"

"What?" Rodney said. "What kind of a question is that? I mean, yes."

The two suits looked at each other, and the one on the left said sharply, "If you won't let _me_ do this, would you at least try not to ask stupid questions?" Then, turning back to the humans, it asked, "What planet are you from?"

Rodney tried to fold his arms, forgetting about the injured one; he ended up awkwardly folding his good arm over his chest. "Sorry. We can't tell you."

Left Suit drew a little weapon and fired in one smooth motion. This was different from the stunners they'd used earlier, which had been basically gun-shaped -- it was a curved thing that arced back over his hand. Ronon saw nothing visible but Rodney gave a yell, jerked and went down hard on his ass on the floor. He didn't really look hurt, more like startled and pissed.

"You okay?" Ronon said.

" _No_!" Rodney snapped. "Did you Asgard jerks just shock me? Because I've had electric shocks before and that felt exactly like the time I didn't pay attention when I was plugging in a CRT and let my finger slip down onto the --"

Left Suit shot him again. Rodney jerked in a quick spasm from head to foot. " _Stop_ it!" he said, but now he looked a little scared as well as pissed.

Ronon reached automatically for his blaster, closed his hand on empty air.

"Okay, let's try this again," Right Suit said. "What's your planet of origin and what are you doing here?"

Rodney took a deep breath and said, "Go to hell."

This time it went on longer, and he seized, losing control and falling onto his back.

"Stop it!" Ronon snarled.

Rodney relaxed, shivering, his eyes wide.

"Will _you_ answer the question?" Left Suit asked.

Ronon figured getting their attention onto him wasn't a bad thing; he could take a lot more physical punishment than Rodney could, and eventually John was bound to show up and break them out. "Like he said, go to hell."

But it was Rodney they shot again. His back arched off the floor; his body went rigid. It looked like he'd stopped breathing.

" _Stop_ it!" Ronon bellowed at them, and managed to lurch to his uninjured foot, the other leg trailing. He didn't have a gun, but he did still have knives, and he let the one under his right bracer slide into his hand, then threw it with a flick of his wrist. The sharp twist in his ribs took his breath away, but his aim was true. It made no difference, though; the knife clattered uselessly off Left Suit's hand.

So Ronon did the only other thing he could: hopped forward a step, interposing himself between Rodney's seizing body and the weapon. He felt a sharp icy rush of pins and needles, and then blinding pain as his muscles seized. He was barely aware of the shock as he hit the floor.

Rodney had collapsed into a limp heap next to him, deathly still for a moment; then his chest hitched and he began gasping. Ronon twisted his head to the side and saw that Rodney bitten his lip; a fine trickle of blood ran down his chin.

"Let's start again," Right Suit said, and this time its attention was fixed on Ronon.

 

******

 

"All right," John whispered. " _That's_ more like it."

The sun was setting behind the mountains, but he and Teyla had found where the ship had gone. Luckily for them, it wasn't far -- but, of course, it wouldn't be, if the Asgard were the source of the faint energy readings that the survey team had recorded. The two of them had rounded the mountain's flank, darting furtively from one patch of cover to the next, working their way carefully up the slope. The entrance to the Asgard facility would have been concealed from the air -- it was hidden under an overhanging cliff face. But they approached it from the side, and it was plainly visible from that angle: a round porthole in the side of the cliff with a door that looked like it irised open, just big enough for a ship like the one they'd seen. John didn't see any sign of overt defenses, but that didn't mean they weren't there.

John handed the binoculars to Teyla and she studied it herself for a few minutes. "I do not see any way to open the door," she said, handing them back. "It is probably like the jumpers, with something like a DHD in the ship itself."

John nodded. "But there's got to be a way."

He used the LSD to check the area, while Teyla changed and fed Torren again. They were sheltered under a scrubby patch of stunted pines. So far, they'd seen no wildlife except some birds and a few small, scampering rodents.

Torren gave a little hiccup when Teyla shifted him to her shoulder.

They were going to have to talk about this sooner or later. "Teyla --" John began.

"Must we have this conversation again?"

"Okay, so you tell me what to do," John shot back. "Babies don't exactly lend themselves to stealth missions."

"Women of my people hunt, and when necessary, we take our babies with us from the time we have recovered from childbirth. There is not always someone to watch them."

"Yeah, but do you take them along to fight Wraith?"

"As the Wraith generally bring the fight to us," Teyla said calmly, "we do not often have a choice. John, do you think I _want_ Torren here? I know how dangerous this is. I want to do what is best for my child, as any mother does, but I do not see many good choices here."

John took a breath and let it out. "All right, how about this. I go in and scout around. You stay out here as my contact. My backup. If you lose contact with me, or if I get into trouble, you go in."

He could see by the look on her face that she didn't really like it, but she nodded.

They waited while full darkness settled on the mountainside. John didn't like waiting. Every moment chafed at him; if Ronon and Rodney were alive, there was no telling what was happening inside the mountain. But it wouldn't help his missing teammates if he lost the element of surprise by jumping into action too quickly.

John used the time to mix a little of the water from his canteen with a handful of silt from the hillside, to darken his face. He checked his gear several times and ate a powerbar. As the light faded from the sky, he kissed a sleeping Torren on top of his little head and then rose. "Wish me luck."

The Atlantis scientists had been pretty sure that the Asgard didn't use radio communication, at least not at the same frequencies as Earth's military, so John left his radio mike open as he approached the door, trying to disturb the rocks on the slope as little as possible. There was still a little light, enough that he could see once his eyes adjusted.

The cliff face and the door loomed above him. The cliff was not sheer and he managed to climb up to the door without too much difficulty. Once he got there, though, he could see no sign of anything other than the door itself, set flush into the cliff. He pulled out the LSD and tried scanning, but all he could tell was that there was nothing immediately behind the door, which he could have figured out anyway. Rodney could get this thing to stand up and do tricks, but John was stuck with the basic functions.

_Damn it, Rodney, the two of you had better be all right._

"I'm here, Teyla," he said quietly into the radio. "And you were right, there's no way to open it from the outside. Any ideas?"

"I have an idea, but you are really not going to like it," Teyla said.

But John had already gotten there himself. Really, there weren't many options. "Lure them out."

"Yes," Teyla said. "And I think I am the logical one to do it."

"No," John said flatly. "No way."

"It is quite likely that they will take me to Ronon and Rodney." She didn't add _If they're alive._ She didn't have to.

"Or maybe they're just killing people. We're nothing but intruders. Those other Asgard didn't seem terribly concerned about Rodney and Jackson's health as soon as they weren't useful anymore."

"If they capture you --"

"Then they'll take _me_ to Ronon and Rodney," John said. "And I'll still have you to back me up."

"Yes, I'm sure I will be very useful if I cannot get in," Teyla said tartly.

"If you didn't have the baby with you, I'd say go for it." Okay, probably a lie -- he couldn't see himself giving Teyla the okay to use herself for bait even if she _didn't_ have the baby, but he wasn't about to tell her that. "But I'm not approving anything that puts Torren in that much danger. I'm sorry."

No answer, then a sharp rattle and clatter from the scree slope below him as Teyla slid down the slope in a shower of rocks.

"Teyla!" John hissed, furious.

"I am sorry, John, but the thing you do not understand is that Torren is Athosian, like me." He could make out her small figure in the twilight, bulky with the baby carrier, as she crouched and reached for something at her feet. "My people are fighters. We do all we can to protect the weakest among us, but even the weakest are fighters, too." She stood, and flung a rock in an overhand motion. She had a good throwing arm; it clattered off the door above John's head. "We do not have noncombatants, John. Michael took all my people, even the infants and the old." She threw another rock.

"Teyla, I'm ordering you to stand down!"

She ignored him and hurled another rock, a bigger one. "My mother took me through the gate on my first trading mission when I was four months old, even knowing that the village on the other side might have been culled, that we might be walking into a culling ourselves, or a Bola Kai ambush. That is the risk every one of my people takes every day. Nowhere is safe. We Athosians know this better than most." Flicking on her flashlight, she waved it above her head, a shaft of white light in the darkness, semaphoring against the black hills. "We do not survive by hiding. We survive by taking the risk because we _know_ any of our people, our family, would take that risk for the rest of us. Torren is Athosian and his family is in danger. Could he make the choice, he would choose this, as I do."

"But he _can't_!" John snapped, and then the door began to rumble above him.

"Ronon and Rodney came for me and for Torren," Teyla said, standing her ground below the cliff. "Now it is our turn to come for them."

Biting his teeth on a curse, John threw himself flat as the Asgard ship passed over him, mere feet above his head. The door stayed open. Even knowing that he had to take the chance, that he couldn't afford to waste Teyla's sacrifice, he had to look over his shoulder. The ship hovered directly above Teyla, casting a pool of blue light around her. It made John think of a B-movie alien abduction. _But of course, the Asgard_ are _Roswell grays, aren't they?_

Then he gritted his teeth and flung himself through the door. On the other side he found a smooth, gently sloping shaft in the rock, exactly as wide as the door.

_Hurry, hurry._

John raced along the shaft, bending and touching it with his fingertips for better traction. It slanted up at about a fifteen-degree angle. There were no lights and he almost broke an ankle falling into what he realized after a panicked instant was some kind of maintenance cubbyhole, giving access to equipment underneath. John knelt and fumbled until he found the outlines of a trap door. He pulled it up -- _don't be locked, don't be locked_ \-- and it came easily, exposing a cramped space that was mostly, but not entirely, blocked with pipes.

John wormed down among them and shut the trap door after himself. It was pitch dark. He could barely move with the pipes pressing all around him, but he didn't dare anyway; for all he knew, there was a half-mile drop to a reactor core underneath him.

He felt vibration transmitted through the rock, but still he waited after it died away for a full five hundred count in his head. Then he pushed up the trap door and poked his head up. It was just as dark in the tunnel as in the maintenance space. John risked a quick look around with his flashlight and found that the door now blocked one end of the tunnel in the direction he'd come from. The other way, the tunnel sloped out of sight.

Hopefully by the time he found Teyla, he wouldn't still be ready to strangle her.

 

******

 

Their captors had not been back in awhile. Rodney leaned his head against the wall. His nerve endings still quivered from the electrical overload. It was not _pain_ , exactly, though it had certainly hurt enough when it was happening -- more like a general sense of head-to-toe wrongness. Everything ached. He couldn't keep his hands from trembling, which scared him; it had better be a short-term effect and not some kind of permanent nerve damage from those shock things. He licked his lips, tasting the crusted blood. At least he hadn't bitten his tongue.

He'd lost consciousness eventually, after a few more applications of the shock gun. When he woke, it was to find Ronon passed out beside him. Deja vu. Ronon hadn't woken up yet, but at least he was breathing, though there was a raspy sound in it, a deep rattling in his chest, that hurt to listen to.

Rodney was pretty sure he hadn't told them anything, but things were pretty hazy towards the end.

_We need a plan._ The idea of just sitting here waiting for their captors to come back and interrogate them again didn't appeal. There was always the hope of John and Teyla coming to save them, but since he'd been unconscious when they were brought here, he didn't even know if they were on the same planet anymore.

_Think, Rodney. What are our assets?_

Unfortunately their assets consisted of two empty and four full packets of Tylenol; a field notebook with the pages clumped together; a cheap calculator that would probably never work again; some wadded Kleenex that had clumped into lumpy paper mache; a bottle of allergy medication and another of sunscreen; and a piece of string. The only marginally useful thing was his 20-function utility knife, but somehow he couldn't see attacking a battle mech with a screwdriver.

_Think, McKay._ Air must be getting in and out of the room somehow -- unless it _wasn't_ , and for an instant panic clutched his throat. _Calm down. Use your head._ He tipped his head back, squinting up at the ceiling. Aha, air vents along the tops of the walls. Very narrow ones. Even if he could get up there, slipping a _hand_ into those would be difficult, let alone anything bigger.

It was possible that he might be able to remove the lights on the ceiling, if he could get there, but then what? Then they'd be in the dark.

Rodney wondered what the room had been used for. Storeroom, maybe. Or maybe it was intended to be set up as a lab or whatever, and they'd lost funding. Did Asgard have research funding? Surely they must...

Without warning, Ronon went from unconscious to fully awake in an instant and started to sit bolt upright -- obviously forgetting about his ribs. He sank back with a groan.

"Uh, ribs," Rodney said.

Ronon glowered at him.

"Sorry. I guess that was kind of unnecessary. I mean, I don't know why --"

_Don't know why you bring out the worst in me._

Ronon looked away and passed a hand over his side, like he was starting to rub it and then thought better of it. Rodney noticed that Ronon's fingers were quivering. He held up his own hand and found that it had mostly stabilized. At least there was that.

"Um, thanks," Rodney said.

"For what?"

"For, you know. Trying to stop them." He waved a hand. "For all the good it did, but it's the thought that counts, and ... thanks."

"Wasn't for you, I'd be at the bottom of the lake right now," Ronon said. "So. Thanks."

There was a very awkward silence.

"You know, I don't --" Rodney began, as Ronon said, "McKay, the thing --"

There was another little silence. Rodney cleared his throat. "Uh. Go ahead?"

Ronon stared up at the ceiling. "The thing in the jumper. What I said. It wasn't ... nice."

Rodney honestly had no idea what he was talking about for a moment. "Oh, what, _that_? Do you have any idea how much worse than that people have said to me? I'm petty, arrogant and bad with people. I'm well aware of that."

"... okay," Ronon said after a pause. "But it wasn't really about me. I don't really care. You know. You're _you_."

"Thanks? I think?"

"It's more about Jennifer."

Rodney realized two things at once. First, he had the headache to end all headaches; second, he really did not want to have this conversation right now. "Oh, great. Here it comes."

"She doesn't deserve you jerking her around," Ronon said.

... and there went his train of thought, right off a cliff. "Wait, what? How am I doing that?"

"You know she's into you, right?"

This conversation had wandered straight into the wilds of What The Hell. "Maybe, but she's _with_ you!"

Ronon gave him a long, started look. "What made you think that?"

"After the whole trapped-on-a-Wraith-ship thing and all, I thought you -- she -- the two of -- would you _help_ me here!"

"We sorta broke up," Ronon said. "Not that we were together, really. But it's kinda over, whatever it was."

Rodney boggled. "You could have told me!"

Ronon's voice was soft and hoarse. "You could've paid attention."

"I _have_ been! Jennifer's been even weirder around me lately than normal."

"Probably because you haven't made any moves and she doesn't know what you want," Ronon said.

"I was trying to be _thoughtful_!"

"It's not working --" Ronon started to say, and then broke off in a coughing fit. It didn't end; he started choking, his face turning red. Rodney got hold of his shoulders and lifted him up, and finally, _finally_ he drew a gasping breath. Rodney found himself breathing again, too.

"It would be poetic justice," Rodney said after a moment, "if you choke to death insulting me. Can you seriously try not to die before I get us out of here?"

"Before _you_ get us out of here," Ronon said in a faint rasp.

"Yes. You heard me. I'm not terribly impressed with your mobility at the moment."

"How's that escape plan coming, then?" Ronon asked as Rodney lowered him back to the floor.

"Well, if you'd stop _distracting_ me ..."

Ronon cleared his throat. "You were gonna say something earlier."

"Oh, you _would_ remember that." Rodney squeezed his eyes shut, shutting away the room, the bare walls, and most importantly, Ronon. "Well, it was about Jennifer, obviously. And it doesn't really apply now, because ... you do know I wouldn't have done anything if you, if she ...?"

"I know," Ronon said softly.

"The thing is, I -- she -- Jennifer is important to me, yes, and I would really like to have a, a thing with her. I think it could work. But this is more important. The team thing, I mean, that I already have. I don't want ..." Rodney swallowed convulsively. "I'm not going to screw all this up for a chance at a relationship. So I won't do it -- do Jennifer -- oh God, you know what I mean -- if you're not okay with it. Even now, really. I really -- I mean that. I need to know you'd be okay with me and Jennifer being ... a thing."

He'd read about being able to feel someone's eyes on you, but he'd never known that it was actually possible. He could feel Ronon's gaze like a physical force, even without looking at him.

"You really _do_ mean that," Ronon said at last, and then added, "Whatever you just said."

More silence. Rodney fiddled with the zipper on his vest.

"Wait," Ronon said. "That was a question? You're actually asking for my ... blessing, or whatever?"

The door slid open.

Rodney scrambled hastily to his feet, interposing himself between the door and Ronon, for all the good _that_ would do. But their captors didn't enter -- they just pushed someone else into the room and closed the door.

He didn't know whether to laugh or cry. "Teyla!"

Teyla looked a little ruffled, but unhurt. Torren was asleep on her back, drooling on her shoulder. She broke into a broad grin when she saw them. "Rodney. Ronon. It is _so_ good to see you."

Rodney fluttered around her, not sure if it was okay to touch, until she grabbed his shoulders and pulled him into a quick little hug. "Did they -- are you -- did they do anything?"

"They did not hurt me. Actually, they treated me quite well, especially after they saw Torren."

"Asgard like babies?" Rodney said dubiously. "That's ... weird."

Teyla knelt beside Ronon, uncharacteristically ponderous with the weight of Torren's carrier throwing off her balance. She squeezed Ronon's hand.

"Where's Sheppard?" Ronon asked.

"John is ... nearby." Teyla reached up to her ear. "They took my gun, but they did not take my radio. Perhaps they did not know what it was for."

"How could they _not_?" Rodney protested. "This has to be some kind of trap."

 

******

 

The tunnel emerged in a large docking bay, much bigger than necessary for the single ship that sat in a berth along one wall. John crouched in a patch of shadow and studied the area carefully with his binoculars and the LSD, but he couldn't see any signs of life. He counted seven more docking cradles like the one the ship occupied, plus a raised berth that was probably for making repairs. Grooved tracks in the floor, John guessed, were meant for some kind of conveyance system to move heavy equipment around.

This place had clearly been a bigger, more important facility at some point in the past. Right now, though, his main concern was figuring out where Teyla had been taken.

"Colonel?" Teyla's voice said in his ear.

John tried to stifle a reflexive flinch, and then an equally automatic grin. "Teyla? Are you all right?"

"I am fine, and so is Torren. We are with Rodney and Ronon."

John's breath caught in his throat. When he could speak, he said, "They're okay?"

"They will be," Teyla said.

John managed to remember he was supposed to be angry. For some reason, it was hard at the moment. "And we're going to talk about chain of command. Later."

"Of course," Teyla agreed equanimously. "In the meantime, Rodney says that you can use the life-signs detector to triangulate on the radio signal."

"Rodney seems to be forgetting that some of us don't have PhDs in engineering."

Teyla started to say something, and then in the background, John heard, "Give me that." A moment later, Rodney's voice said, "Do you have a screwdriver? Open up the back of the scanner --"

"Hello to you too, McKay." As he took out his Swiss army knife -- _Don't leave home without it_ \-- he couldn't help adding, "Nice flying."

Rodney made a choking noise. John grinned, visualizing his expression as he sputtered. "Okay, it's open. Now what?"

A few moments later, he'd made the modifications and held it up to look at the screen. "You'll only get a signal when the radio is transmitting," Rodney was saying. "Like now. It should be showing you direction and signal strength."

"Sure," John said, moving it back and forth. "In Ancient. That's useful."

Rodney snorted. "Like you don't read Ancient."

John's eyebrows went up. He had no idea anyone had noticed. "Well, the basics."

" _Anyway_. The angle is the important part, and that should be idiot-proof. Once you have a fix, bring up the menus from the bottom and lock it -- now it'll function sort of like a GPS and keep pointing in that direction no matter how you turn it. Working?"

John rotated it. "Working."

"Great. You can either take another reading from a different angle and triangulate, or just follow it and use the signal strength as a guide." Rodney paused and then, "Why aren't you answering?"

"Because I'm not alone, Rodney," John whispered. "Hush."

A lone Asgard in a battle suit had entered the docking bay. It crossed the floor towards the ship, and John saw it was carrying something. As it approached, he realized the object dangling loosely from one of its hands was Ronon's blaster.

_Ronon's gonna want that back._

He saw no sign of anyone else. The Asgard used some sort of wrist-mounted device to open the door to the ship, and left it open as it went inside. _Perfect._

"Maintain radio silence until further notice," John whispered, and then, P90 at the ready, he crossed the open floor as quickly and stealthily as possible, and followed the Asgard into the ship.

He hadn't seen the inside of the Pegasus Asgard ships before. It reminded him a little of the _Daedalus,_ and a little of Ancient architecture. The corridors were dull, scuffed and corroded, lit intermittently with flickering lights broken up by dead panels. John actually saw moss in a couple of corners. It was a wonder the thing flew at all.

The Asgard did not appear to notice him. John followed it down a couple of short corridors -- the ship wasn't large. It entered a room, somewhat more brightly lit than the rest of the ship, and John waited a moment before peeking around the doorway.

It was the cargo hold, much smaller than that of the _Daedalus_ , but still fairly large -- it probably took up half of the small ship's length. The wreckage of the jumper hulked in the middle of it, surrounded by a spill of half-dried mud and weeds. John's mouth went dry, staring at the damage. He was glad that Teyla had been able to report back before he'd seen that -- he would certainly have assumed that Ronon and Rodney had been killed. Reflecting back on her comment that they _would be_ all right, he wondered about the nature of their injuries. That might complicate a rescue.

He didn't see the Asgard until a movement caught his eye, off to the left. John hastily yanked his head back, then risked peeking out again. It had its back to him, standing at a long workbench. The bench looked completely out of place with the rest of the ship, even given the ship's state of disrepair: it was made of wooden planks mounted on what looked for all the world like sawhorses. Various items were spread out on it, mostly unfamiliar-looking bits of alien technology, but he recognized a half-dismantled stunner like the ones the Asgard on Atlantis had used, and also -- his heart quickened -- a P90 and a handgun that had almost certainly been taken from Teyla. Some of the other components could only have come from the jumper.

Okay, so the question was -- now what? He, Teyla and a squad of Marines had taken down one of these suits by emptying several full-auto clips into it. He was just one guy, with one spare clip. Right now he had the perfect opportunity to shoot it from behind, but he certainly couldn't take it down before it turned around and shot _him_ back.

The more logical thing would be to slip out again and find his team. He was the only one free. Risking his freedom, and therefore his team's lives, certainly wasn't worth getting the blaster back.

But that damn thing meant a lot to Ronon.

Then the Asgard, to John's gratified surprise, solved his problem for him. After laying the blaster down on the workbench, it reached up and gripped its helmet. As it pulled the helmet off, John raised his P90 and steeled himself for what he was about to do. _Gotcha, you little gray team-napping bastard._

But the head that emerged was not smooth and gray. Instead, it had a shock of sweat-matted dark hair laced with gray. When the figure turned its head to the side, John caught a glimpse of a hawklike profile and a scruffy beard.

What the _hell_?

These guys were human.

The man in the Asgard suit bent his shaggy head over the blaster. John faltered, lowering the gun. He hadn't felt especially good about sniping an alien, but it was a far cry from blowing this guy's brains all over his workbench.

For one thing, he wanted to know who these people were and how they got an Asgard ship.

John crept from cover, the P90 ready just in case. Though he moved as quietly as he knew how, something alerted the guy in the suit -- a movement, a sound. He started to turn, saying, "Wha --" And that was as far as he got; John charged forward and slammed the butt of the P90 against the man's temple. He went down, groaning. John knelt on top of him, rolled him onto his back, and fumbled with the suit until he figured out how to open the clamps so that he could strip the guy out of the armor. Underneath, he found that the "alien" was actually a pot-bellied guy in his forties, stripped down to loose underwear of coarse Pegasus cloth.

"Teyla," John said. "Or Rodney, whoever's got the radio. You there?"

"I am here, John," Teyla's voice said.

"I just found out something interesting. These guys in the suits? They're not Asgard. They're human -- at least, they look like it."

Teyla sucked in her breath. "How fascinating." In the background John could hear Rodney say plaintively, "What? What's fascinating?"

"I'll let you know more when I know more. We're about to have a little interrogation here." John signed off and then drew his Beretta. He smacked the stranger's hairy cheek with the open palm of his other hand. "Hey. Sleeping Beauty."

The guy made a garbled sound and blinked. "Uh, what? Oh ..." His eyes opened wide, and he scrabbled with outflung hands.

"Stop that." John planted a knee in his chest.

"Who are you?" the man gasped. "Where is Miri?"

Now it was John's turn to be nonplused. "Miri?"

"My wife." The man's lip curled; his face turned ugly. "If you've hurt her, I'll cut off your hands. Then your head."

"Whoa, whoa. No one is cutting off hands or heads today. Including me, I hope." John held up the 9-mil so that the guy could see it, and then shoved it under his chin. "We're just having a friendly chat. What's your name?"

"Kaz," the man mumbled sullenly.

"Okay, Kaz. How many of you are there?"

Silence."

John pushed the gun into the soft tissue under Kaz's throat, making him cough. "Look, do you _really_ want to do this the hard way?"

Kaz swallowed. "Just -- just me and Miri. Just us."

"Seriously? Just the two of you?" John gave the gun another thrust. "Where are my team?"

Kaz swallowed again. "I'll take you to them, but first I want to see Miri."

"Miri is safe, for now," John semi-lied, hoping that Miri didn't walk up behind him while he was distracted and blow his head off. He was trying to keep one eye on the doorway, but he had to keep dividing his attention to do it. "You take me to my friends, and you'll be reunited with Miri. Scout's honor."

Kaz made a low snarling sound.

"Deal?"

"Get off me, then."

John stepped back to let him get up, then pressed the gun into Kaz's back. "Wait." He retrieved Ronon's blaster from the workbench, shoved it into the top of his vest. "Okay. _Now_ we can go."

"Can I at least put a shirt on? I'm freezing!"

John relented enough to let him put on the boots from the Asgard suit. It was mostly practicality -- the clumsy boots would make it harder for him to get away, but not slow him down as much as bare feet on the cold floor.

"So," John said as they made their way down from the ship's hatch. He glanced warily around for the elusive Miri, with suit or without, but there was no sign of her. "You were going to tell me how you guys got this ship."

"We found it," Kaz said. "It's ours."

"Interesting definition of _yours_. Where'd you find it?"

"Desorbia," Kaz said reluctantly, and John remembered the place after a moment: a once-thriving but now Wraith-culled world, mostly abandoned except for squatters and smugglers who used its ruined buildings as hideouts. His team had gone there a couple of times seeking information -- the Genii had an outpost there, and several of Ronon's Satedan acquaintances frequented it.

"I'm guessing you weren't there for its scenic tropical beaches."

Kaz shot a bitter look at him over one shoulder. "Hey, we found the ship fair and square. It was out in the jungle, nobody using it. Found these suits in it too."

"I'm amazed you know how to use any of this stuff."

Kaz snorted. "What do you think we are, a couple of hicks? Miri went to school on Hoff. The Krisgow Academy." He paused for John to be suitably impressed. When John said nothing, he went on, "And I'm really handy with mechanical stuff."

"I'm sure." John surreptitiously checked the LSD. The arrow was now pointing away from their direction of travel. "You sure you're taking me to my friends?"

"Of course," Kaz said, a little too quickly.

"Uh huh." John nudged him with the gun. "I really hate being lied to. You want to find out how much I hate it?"

Kaz said nothing, but he took a branching cross-passageway, and now the arrow pointed more or less true again.

"So," John said. "You found the ship, and you found this place too? Quite a coincidence."

"It brought us here," Kaz said. "The ship, that is. It basically flies itself. When we first figured out how to start it up, it came here automatically. Later we figured out how to make it take us where we wanted to go, and we used this place for a base of operations while we --"

He broke off.

"Oh, go ahead," John said, checking the LSD again. So far, Kaz seemed to be playing him straight. "Robbed people? Something like that, I'm guessing?"

"We've only had to pull off a few jobs," Kaz said reluctantly. "With the ship, we're unstoppable. I can pay you," he added, his voice growing eager. "Let you in on some of our take, even. You guys look like you'd be pretty good in a fight. Where _are_ you from?"

"Nice try," John said. These people, he thought, were nothing but small-time bandits who'd stumbled into advanced technology that made them nearly invincible in the generally low-tech Pegasus Galaxy. Perhaps they hadn't even been thieves when they'd found the ship; maybe they were hiding out from something or someone, and the lure of easy money had proven too much. Atlantis would seem like a world of untold riches to them -- which, of course, was exactly what they'd guessed when they'd seen the jumper.

"Did you make my ship crash?" John asked, and he could tell that the anger he felt had infused into his voice, from the way Kaz flinched.

"Not us, no, not on purpose," the bandit said hastily. "It just did that; we went out to see what had happened. There's still a lot about this place we haven't figured out."

Great. So they'd tripped some kind of security measure, and Bonnie and Clyde had swooped in to check out the pickings. Speaking of Bonnie ... he glanced nervously over his shoulder, but the corridor behind them was empty. He didn't think Kaz had been given an opportunity to signal her, but he had no idea what kind of surveillance tech they might have, or whether they had scheduled check-ins that Kaz had now missed. Based on their overall sloppiness, though, he doubted it.

He took a quick peek at the LSD. The arrow had rotated; though the corridor was straight, the arrow was now pointing off to the side. "Do we need to have another chat about leading me into a trap versus leading me to my team? Because I don't think you'll enjoy it."

"We're almost there," Kaz said, gesturing to a turn in the corridor up ahead.

John didn't think so, especially since this was going in the wrong direction too. They'd been walking much too long, and possibly in circles. It was likely that the prisoners were being held closer to the docking bay. "I'm not in a mood --" he began, and then Kaz stepped around the corner, John close on his heels, and --

\-- dropped out of sight. John wasn't expecting that, any more than he was expecting his next step to be into empty air. " _Son_ of a --" was all he got out as he fell.

 

******

 

"You should call him," Rodney said for the umpteenth time.

"Rodney," Teyla sighed. She was taking advantage of the downtime to nurse Torren; he snuggled into her jacket, contented and happy. "John is quite capable of taking care of himself, and I imagine he is very busy."

"Yes, I'm sure, but now he needs to share with the class and tell us what he's learned!"

Rodney was pacing, despite a slight limp. Teyla had given the two of them what first aid she could, but she had little to work with -- nothing to bind Rodney's injured arm or Ronon's ribs, no antiseptic for the scrapes on Rodney's face, no painkillers stronger than the headache medicine in the little red-and-white packets. Ronon wouldn't let her look at his ankle, but he was clearly hovering on the edge of shock -- his skin pale, his eyes sunken and half-lidded. Though she was loathe to admit it, she did share Rodney's impatience.

The soft whisper of the door gave a split second's warning, but not enough, because the figure in the battle suit came through firing. The first shot took Ronon as he struggled to rise; he stiffened and collapsed bonelessly to the floor. The shooter swiveled to Teyla, but hesitated. The gun skipped over her and kept swinging towards Rodney, who was lunging for the battle suit's gun arm -- a brave move, but he had only fragile human flesh to pit against metal. The being in the suit backhanded him, slamming him into the wall. Rodney gave a strangled cry of pain and punched it in the shoulder -- a useless move, except ... With a whine of servos, the suit's gun arm froze, bent and half-upraised, sparks dancing around its shoulder.

Rodney gripped his utility knife in his fist, the screwdriver blade extended and buried to the handle in the suit's shoulder joint.

The battle suit's occupant made a very un-Asgardlike noise of frustration, its humanness evident even through the mechanical distortion. It walloped Rodney in the side of the head with its other hand, and then struggled to pry open the fingers of its gun hand as Rodney crumpled to the floor. The gun was pointing at the ceiling, the arm completely immobile from shoulder to fingertips.

Teyla had been taking full advantage of Rodney's distraction, shrugging as quickly as possible out of her jacket and laying it down against Ronon's limp body, in the crook between his arm and uninjured side. Ronon was breathing, she saw with weak-kneed relief, and Torren, wrapped in the jacket, did not stir.

Now unencumbered with the baby, Teyla sprang to her feet and closed the distance between herself and their attacker in a single bound. The suited figure swung around, but it was slow, weighed down by its armor. Teyla was fast. She darted behind it. How did the suit come off? There was a joint between helmet and neck -- she seized the helmet in both hands and yanked on it, while the suited figure struggled and tried to reach over its own shoulder to grab her.

The helmet came loose with a sharp mechanical _pop_ , revealing a head of pinned-up dark hair. The person swung around to face her -- it was a woman, about Teyla's age, pretty in a hard-edged kind of way.

She started to swing a mailed fist, as she'd done to Rodney, and Teyla punched her in the face. The woman staggered and fell. Teyla punched her again, splitting her lip and knocking her onto her back. The woman thrashed feebly, still trying to rise, but dazed, uncoordinated. Teyla fought with the suit, trying to find a way to deactivate it.

"Here," Rodney said in a slurred voice. He was on hands and knees; he reached for them, but missed. Teyla pinned the woman's working arm with her whole body -- the suit was much stronger, of course, but with Teyla's full weight on it, the woman couldn't get the leverage to move it effectively. Rodney fell over, pushed himself up doggedly and reached for the suit's neck. Teyla couldn't see what he did, but the suit made a mechanical whining sound and froze.

"You can get up," Rodney mumbled, "she can't move, she's --" He coughed, broke off, coughed again and retched.

Teyla rolled off the woman, whose bloodied face was a mask of impotent fury as she fought the immobile suit. Teyla had little thought for her, though. She caught Rodney's face gently between her hands. "Rodney, let me see your eyes."

His pupils looked normal, though she could tell he was having trouble focusing on her. "Just ... let me lie down for a minute," he said, and slumped to the floor.

Teyla patted his shoulder and went to check on Ronon, who was already starting to wake up, stirring sluggishly. "Being stunned sucks," he mumbled. "Gotta remember to apologize to Sheppard."

Teyla patted him too, checked to make sure he was breathing evenly, and then picked up Torren in the jacket -- for an instant she had a startling flash of the first time she'd ever seen him, dwarfed in Rodney's jacket. Now he was so large that he was spilling out of hers. Carrying him, she approached their downed enemy with care: the woman might have found a way to get the suit working again.

"You're a mother, aren't you?" Teyla said gently.

The woman left off struggling with the suit and glared at her, sullen and tight-lipped.

"I didn't think about it in the ship; I didn't realize you were human at that time. But as soon as the two of you realized I had a baby, you treated me very kindly."

No reply. Teyla sat crosslegged between the woman and Rodney, and rested a hand on Rodney's back.

"I am Teyla. How many children do you have? This is my firstborn, my son, Torren."

After a moment the woman said, very grudgingly, "Two. Boys. Seven and four." Then she clamped her mouth shut as if she'd said too much.

"Those are good ages." Teyla smiled at her. "Are they close, or do they quarrel? My husband, Kanaan, often quarreled with his brothers."

"They're good boys," the woman said. "And you'll never find them, even if you try. You stay away from our children."

"We don't want to hurt your children," Teyla said in a soothing voice, such as she might use on a wild animal. "We only want to leave; we have no intention of hurting any of you."

"Yeah, right. I saw your accomplice holding my husband at gunpoint. That's when I came here."

Rodney managed to sit up. "You guys _tortured_ us! What kind of --"

Teyla patted his knee. "Rodney. Please let me handle this." Returning her attention to the woman in the Asgard suit, she continued, "I think both of us want the same thing: to leave each other's company, our families unharmed. How might we arrange this so that we are both satisfied?"

 

******

 

John lost his grip on the 9-mil as he pitched forward. It pinwheeled out of sight below him, but he twisted his body like a cat, grabbing for something, anything. He caught hold of a thick metal edge of something, and clung to it. Below him, the Beretta clattered against metal.

Looking down between his feet, John glimpsed big metal cylinders and fat bundles of wires, some forty feet below him. The thing he'd caught hold of was a heavy metal bar protruding from the rock -- the edge, John guessed, of a metal floor or catwalk that was meant to retract, now stuck in a mostly-retracted position.

And Kaz --

John started turning, just in time to catch a boot in the side as Kaz kicked him. Knowing this was here, the bandit had dropped and caught hold of a metal ladder bolted to the rock. He'd lost one of the boots from the mech-suit, but still had the other one. It was like being hit in the side with a shovel. One of John's hands slipped free and for a moment he swung from one arm, gasping for air.

Kaz kicked at him again with his booted foot, but missed. John swung in Kaz's direction and took a calculated risk, letting go, his momentum carrying him into the bandit. Kaz shrieked and nearly fell as John managed to catch hold of a rung of the ladder. They grappled, Kaz freeing first one arm and then the other as he tried to punch John in the face.

"John?" Teyla said over the radio, and John almost lost his grip on the ladder.

"Not now!"

In that moment of distraction, Kaz managed to get one arm around John's neck, trying to wrench his head around. The one saving grace was that he couldn't use the other hand without letting go of the ladder. John hooked an arm over a rung and brought up the P90, butt first, to hit Kaz in the jaw with it. The bandit flailed backwards and lost hold of the ladder, but not of John's neck. The suddenly added weight yanked John forward with a violent jerk -- it felt for a moment as if his arm had separated at the shoulder.

"Don't let me fall!" Kaz gasped, terrified, clutching at John.

"Well, stop _hitting_ me, dumbass!"

John pulled him back up. As soon as Kaz got a hand on the ladder, he tried to wrench the P90 from John's vest, twisting it so that the muzzle pointed at John's face.

"Oh, for pete's sake!" John lashed out, kicking him in the knee. Kaz's grip hadn't been solid enough to withstand the shock and pain, and he fell. John, by instinct more than anything, grabbed for him, but he wasn't fast enough: Kaz plunged into the machinery below. John heard him hit something with a painful-sounding thud, and looked down to see that Kaz had slid down to rest between two of the big metal cylinders.

"Idiot," John said in disbelief, and hauled himself back up to terra firma. "Teyla?"

"I am glad to hear your voice, John. Is everything all right?"

"It is now." John peered over the edge. In the dim light, it was hard to tell if Kaz was breathing or not, but he certainly wasn't moving. "How are you guys doing?"

"We have made a new friend," Teyla said.

John heard Rodney say in the background, "Oh, is _that_ what we're calling it now?"

"Tell me about this new friend of yours," John said.

"Her name is Miri. She and her husband are partners in a smuggling operation, using this place as a base."

"Guy named Kaz? Kind of surly?"

"That is probably her husband, yes."

"Uh ..." John peeked over the edge again. "I think I just killed him."

Teyla's sigh was very loud -- it was her _I am trying to negotiate with these people, but you are not making it easy for me_ sound.

"He was trying to kill _me_ at the time," John tried.

"Is there any chance," Teyla said, speaking with care, "that you might be mistaken?"

Now it was John's turn to sigh. "I'll go check."

He swung back onto the ladder and climbed down. The rungs were spaced a little too close together for human comfort; his back and shoulders were cramping by the time he made it to the bottom, where a narrow catwalk ran along the wall just above the metal cylinders.

The surface of the nearest cylinder was finely machined and slightly oily. John tried to plant a foot on it, only to have it nearly go out from under him. He had to sit down and then slide down between them, one foot on either side of the crevice, trying very hard not to think about what might happen if whatever-this-was switched on while he was down here.

Kaz was crumpled like a rag doll, but when John leaned over and checked his pulse, it was fast and strong. One of his arms was clearly broken, and blood covered the side of his head.

"For the record," John said to him, as he slung Kaz over his shoulder, "you're turning out to be even more of a pain in my ass than I thought you were going to be."

He looked around for his 9-mil, but couldn't see it anywhere; it must have skittered into the dark recesses of the machinery. Great. Another form to fill out.

 

******

 

By mutual arrangement over the radio, they met back at the ship. Ronon kept insisting that he could walk, but the first time he tried to take a step, all the blood drained out of his face and he nearly fell over. Rodney had enough trouble just walking straight after being clouted in the head. Teyla suggested that they re-enable the suit so that Miri could help Ronon.

"That's a terrible idea," Rodney said.

Teyla frowned at him and pried Miri's gun from the suit's frozen fingers. "You will leave the helmet off," she told Miri. "This gun stuns, correct? I am an excellent shot and will not hesitate to shoot you in the head."

"Very trusting," Miri said sarcastically.

"Considering the _torture_ ," Rodney snapped, "not to mention my head injury, you're lucky that we're willing to deal with you at all."

But at Teyla's urging, he fixed whatever he'd done to the suit's controls. He did leave the right arm immobile, insisting that it was too broken to fix -- Teyla eyed him suspiciously, but she couldn't prove he was lying. Besides, it was a good point; Miri would be easier to manage with only one working arm.

The other arm was more than strong enough to support Ronon's weight, anyway.

Miri directed them to the docking bay. By the time they got there, John had laid out Kaz on the floor by the ship's ramp. Miri sucked in her breath when she saw him.

"Don't worry," John said, seeing her face. "He's -- well, not _okay_ exactly, but he came around a little bit ago, yelled at me, and then passed out again. Gonna need to see a doctor, though." He looked past Miri, at Rodney and Ronon, and Teyla saw relief flood his face, followed by concern as he took in their battered condition. "You okay? Did these guys do anything to you?"

"What, you mean besides the torture and beating?" Rodney said, touching the side of his head, where his short hair was matted with half-dried blood.

John's expression, already wary, went dark. Teyla stepped in hastily. "We do not need to lay recriminations on either side. All we want to do is leave."

"Actually, I don't think that's _all_ we want." John turned to address Miri. "You could just let us go. Our people will be back to pick us up in the morning. But we've got hurt people, and so do you. We'd be willing to lend medical assistance to you, if you use your ship to take us up to the spacegate."

"Our ship won't fit through the gate," Miri said.

"Ours will. We just need to be able to contact our people."

"If we help you," Miri said, "we expect to be paid."

"Oh, for crying out loud!" Rodney said, and Ronon, apparently agreeing with him, made a growling noise low in his throat.

"The way I see it," John said, "you guys kidnapped us. You hurt my people. We're willing to let bygones be bygones, in the sense that we're not planning on coming back with heavy artillery to wipe you all out --"

Teyla saw Miri's face pale; apparently she hadn't thought of that.

"-- or turning you in to the authorities, even though you probably deserve it. But you're not the wronged parties here. We are. And right now, we've hold most of the cards, too. We could deal with you like you've dealt with us: lock you up and steal your ship. Instead, all we want is a little cooperation, and then you'll never see us again."

 

******

 

Eventually Miri agreed to cooperate when Rodney pointed out that he could probably figure out how to get the ship running, and John would fly it. "So I guess you guys are expendable, hmm?" This earned another weary glance from Teyla, but it worked. And they said he couldn't do diplomacy.

Miri, stripped of her Asgard armor, flew the ship, with John guarding her. Kaz was awake but groggy; they'd locked him in one of the other rooms on the ship. Both bandits had refused all offers of medical aid or painkillers. It was obvious that they suspected a double-cross. Rodney didn't blame them. Every time he moved, the dizziness and sharp pain in his skull made him wonder if cooperating with these guys was a good idea at all.

They stopped by the campsite, en route to the Stargate, to pick up the remainder of their gear. Miri hovered the ship just above the shore; Teyla put Torren into Ronon's arms and then she and Rodney went down to pack up. Rodney wasn't sure how much help he was, with only one functional arm and dubious equilibrium, but the night air helped with his headache, and Teyla seemed to appreciate the company.

"Some vacation," he muttered, helping her drag the cooler to the ship.

"It is still better than the time we went to the beach on Thalania," Teyla said.

"That was the one where Sheppard stepped on the jellyfish thing and went into anaphylaxis, wasn't it? Yeah, that sucked. Though I think the time when we camped on that floodplain on M29-Y8T was worse when it came to sheer terror of life and limb."

Teyla nodded and hefted the cooler into the ship's cargo hold with apparent ease. Rodney wondered if she actually needed him at all. "I also was not fond of the world on which the outlaw gang robbed us."

"Which ones? Were those the outlaws on the rhino-horse-things, or the ones with the weird Mad Max motorbikes?"

"I was in fact thinking of the ones riding the _rikaeli_ , but I had forgotten about the other incident, to be honest."

"Do _all_ our vacations end in disaster?" Rodney asked plaintively.

Teyla didn't answer, which he figured was probably answer enough.

The Asgard ship didn't have a DHD, but the jumper's was still intact. Rodney set to work cobbling together a power hookup from the ship so that they could dial the gate.

"Now here's a question for you," John said. He was leaning against the side of the jumper, watching Rodney work, while Teyla took a turn guarding Miri. "I don't want to let them have the jumper, even in this condition. They don't need to know any more about our capabilities than they already do. How do we keep it from them? It's deadweight; we can't move it, and if we jettison it, they'll just come back and pick it up later."

Rodney snorted. "Easy. Dial the gate, point the ship at the gate and open the doors. The decompression will suck the jumper out, momentum carries it into the gate, problem solved."

"And then we'd have a derelict jumper in the middle of the gateroom."

"I didn't say the plan was entirely without flaws." Rodney rubbed his aching temple and thought about it. "Okay, we'll send it to some other planet, come back and get it later."

John thought, turning the plan over in his head. "That'd work, I guess."

"Hello? Genius."

"And modest, too," John said.

Rodney laughed. It hurt his head. "Do you really think it's a good idea to just let them go?"

"Oh, probably not," John said. "But I don't feel like any more death and mayhem today, do you? If they really do have kids stashed somewhere in that facility, it's not fair to kill their parents. If they become a problem for us later, we'll deal with it then."

Rodney thought about arguing, then decided he was just too damn tired. "It's your call, I guess."

John took off his radio and laid it next to Rodney's knee. "Here, genius; call up to the control room when the DHD's working, and we'll phone home, ET. I'd better go make sure that Miri and Teyla are getting along."

"Teyla can take care of herself," Rodney said absently, and then looked up as John started to speak. "Ah, and now you're going to say 'But it's not Teyla I'm worried about.' See, even with a head injury I can anticipate your jokes. Which means you've become predicable."

"I'd say it means we've been spending way too much time together," John said, and wandered off.

Rodney went back to trying to twist together little fiddly wires, which was annoying enough even when he didn't have a blinding headache and one mostly-nonfunctional arm. And then he realized, once he got the wires in place, that the crimping tool he needed was all the way on the far side of the jumper. "You couldn't stick around for five more minutes?" he snapped at the ceiling, as if John could hear him.

Something tapped his shoulder. Rodney jumped and almost banged his sore head on the console. _That_ wouldn't have felt good. "Warn a guy next time, Shep -- oh, it's you." Ronon was holding onto the side of the jumper with one hand and holding the tool out to him.

Rodney pressed the wires into place with his thumb long enough to get a hand on the crimper, and then pressed them permanently into their new position. It wouldn't hold forever, but ought to do for no longer than they'd need it. "Push one of the buttons on the DHD."

"Which one?"

"I don't know! Pick one."

There was a small click, not the usual powering-up sound of a working DHD. Still, Rodney asked hopefully, "Did it light up?"

"Nope."

"Not even a little bit?" Great. There must be a loose connection somewhere in the console. Not surprising after the beating it had taken, but still. Groaning, Rodney pried open another panel one-handed.

"I would say I'm surprised that you can still move around that quietly with only one leg, but not so much, really." He glanced up at Ronon. It looked like someone, probably Teyla, had finally gotten him to take his boot off and let her wrap his ankle. Rodney was glad he'd missed that. "Should you be walking on it?"

Ronon shrugged. "I've had worse." He still looked pale and shaky, though, and he coughed as if to punctuate the fact that he really should not be out of bed.

"We've _all_ had worse by this point, but that doesn't make it _fun_." Rodney ran his fingers over the crystals inside the console. Several of them were damaged, but none in the main power array ... wait, _there_ was a promising suspect.

"Rodney," Ronon said.

"Busy!" Rodney said. He popped out the crystal and then the thought occurred to him, belatedly, that, oh right, they'd been interrupted in the middle of the conversation o' doom in the cell. Great. "Uh, go ahead, I guess."

"The answer. To your question? Answer's yes."

Rodney frowned, seeking backwards. "Yes, you do mind?"

Ronon cuffed him gently in the arm.

"Ow! I'm _injured_ , you know."

"Not in that arm."

"And also doing delicate precision work here." But he found that he didn't really mind. In fact, the tight ball at the pit of his stomach had loosened somewhat. Rodney raised his eyes to meet Ronon's, not quite sure what he expected to see there.

Ronon looked exhausted, his face tight with pain, but he was smiling, just a little bit. Rodney felt the knot in his stomach unwind a little more.

"You're really okay with it. With me and Jennifer."

"McKay ..." Ronon's eyes skittered away, and he stared across the cargo hold. "I'd be lying if I said there wasn't still a little part of me -- look, it's going to take awhile to get over her. But it _is_ over. She let me know what she wants. And if it's gotta be someone else, someone who isn't me, I'd much rather see her with someone who's ..."

"A genius?" Rodney said.

"I was going to say, not a total loser."

"Oh, gee, thanks."

"Besides ... that gate tech, Amelia -- she's pretty hot."

Rodney snorted and picked an undamaged crystal out of another array. Even his throbbing head didn't hurt that much anymore. "Sure, if you like the buff, can-totally-kick-your-ass type. Which, uh, you probably do, come to think of it." He snapped the crystal into place. "Okay, try the buttons again."

This time, there was the familiar sound of a DHD locking a symbol. "Yes!" Rodney said, and grinned up at Ronon. "You ready to get out of here?"

"And how," Ronon said. But he was still smiling.

Rodney smiled back at him, and tapped his radio. "Hey, ET? It's time to phone home."


End file.
